Enemies from Within Speech

On February 9, 1950, Joseph R. McCarthy delivered the “Enemies from Within” speech to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. The speech was one of many Lincoln Day events that Republicans held annually, and since McCarthy’s record in the Senate over the previous three years had been fairly unremarkable, there were few expectations regarding his speech. McCarthy had prepared the speech to address the Communist threat, although he also touched on a host of other concepts. The speech exhibits some of the tropes associated with Anti-Intellectualism in American politics. McCarthy expounds at length on the question of whether Communists have infiltrated the State Department. He moves from suspicion to accusation and back again, at times citing evidence and at other times not, in a style that evokes The Threat of Political Betrayal. Throughout the speech, McCarthy exhibits a stark, Manichaean framework with which he divides the world into hostile camps. But throughout this polarizing rhetoric there are The New American Exceptionalism and other related Puritan myths in secularized form. It is widely believed that McCarthy’s Wheeling speech inaugurated the movement that bore his name.